Timothy Edmunds

Professor Edmunds is currently Director of the Global Insecurities Centre in School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies of the Bristol University. His research focuses on defence and security institutions in processes of political and organisational change. Using empirical studies of the postcommunist region, the former Yugoslavia, and most recently the UK, he examines how organisational responses to common challenges – including democratisation, European integration and defence reform – are shaped and conditioned by contingent factors. Edmunds’ work emphasises the normative and contested nature of these processes, in contrast to much literature in this area which presents them as a neutral, technocratic process of organisational betterment or strategic necessity. In so doing, it highlights the ways in which externally derived, often generic, models of reform can be in tension with local political, institutional and societal circumstances, and the manner in which local actors respond to these.